Chirality is one of the most familiar ideas in science. Human hands are chiral because the left and right hand are mirror images that cannot be perfectly aligned on top of one another. The same idea appears in chemistry, where molecules with opposite handedness can behave very differently. In recent years, physicists have discovered that […]
Author: Howard Wiseman, Director, Centre for Quantum Dynamics, Griffith University As Homer tells us, Odysseus made an epic journey, against the odds, from Troy to his home in Ithaca. He visited many lands, but mostly dwelt with the nymph Calypso on her island. We can imagine that his wife, Penelope, would have asked him about […]
Artificial Intelligence • Biology • Computer science • Genetics
Researchers at the University of Oregon have developed an artificial intelligence tool that can read genetic code the way large language models like ChatGPT read text. Scanning the genome for biological mutation patterns, the computer model traces pairs of genes back in time to their last common ancestor. It’s the first language model designed for […]
For decades, biology textbooks have repeated the same idea with almost ritual certainty: neural stem cells, the cells that fuel the birth of neurons and glia during development, live exclusively inside the brain and spinal cord. They are the architects of the central nervous system, and nowhere else. It has always seemed like an elegant […]
In recent years, “twistronics” has shown that simply changing how two crystal layers sit on top of each other can completely transform their electronic behavior. When two lattices are slightly mismatched in size or rotated by a small angle, they create a larger repeating interference pattern called a moiré superlattice. This long-wavelength pattern acts like […]
Authors: Kevin Burke, Associate Professor in Statistics, University of Limerick and David O’Sullivan, Associate Professor of Mathematics and Statistics, University of Limerick Recently, a cheerful 100-year-old message in a bottle was found on the south-west coast of Australia. In it, a world war one soldier proclaimed to be “as happy as Larry”. If you’re a […]
Methane is the second-largest greenhouse gas after carbon dioxide. According to the Climate and Clean Air Coalition, anthropogenic methane emissions account for nearly 45% of current net warming, making it an important factor in global warming. An international research team led by a scholar from City University of Hong Kong (CityUHK) has broken through the […]
Nanogels are among the most interesting examples of how chemists can build useful structures by working at the scale of single molecules. They are tiny soft particles made from polymers, long chain-like molecules, that are linked together into small three-dimensional networks. Because they can hold water and trap other molecules inside, nanogels are especially attractive […]
T-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia (T-ALL) and T-cell acute lymphoblastic lymphoma (T-LBL) are aggressive hematological malignancies that arise from abnormal activation of oncogenes and/or inactivation of tumor-suppressor genes, followed by a differentiation arrest and uncontrolled clonal expansion of immature thymocytes . Proviral integration site for Moloney-murine leukemia 1 (PIM1) is a known JAK-STAT target gene that […]
Few concepts in physics are as familiar, yet as enigmatic, as time. In Einstein’s theory of relativity, time is not absolute: its passage depends on motion and gravity. But when combined with quantum physics, this relativistic form of time becomes even more counterintuitive. Testing quantum superpositions of time According to quantum theory, the flow of […]